Preschoolers’ Leadership-Followership Communication in Outdoor Pretend Play

Pretend play provides enriched environments for multiple cognitive and social purposes. The quality of children's pretend play depends on the process, including children's back and forth proposals and responses about the play frames. Proposing and responding to play ideas with metacommunication use, leadership-followership interactions are required in which the leaders and followers are interdependent to effectively move play frames forward. The purpose of this study was to examine the use of metacommunication and leadership/followership processes expressed in social pretend play. A conceptual framework was built on works on leadership development and Vygotsky's work of pretend play, describing the dynamic nature of leadership process within social pretend play. Results indicate that children's use of metacommunication varies by which components of pretend play (i.e., imaginary situation, play role, play rule) they are discussing and with whom they are communicating. Results also show how much the factors of interest – use of metacommunication, child gender, and the role of followership – may impact children's successful pretend play, represented by sustained pretend play with agreement on the play situation, play roles, and play rules by all players involved.